Some eponymies in science

In history, it is rare that scientist achieve notoriety and fame during their lifetimes. If they nonetheless do, they get credit and lasting recognition by having a scientific discovery named after them.

However, there happen to be wrong naming attributions. Indeed, naming disputes are so common that there is even a rule of thumb called the Zeroth theorem, which states that eponymous discoveries are, more often than not, wrongly attributed. Appropriately enough, the theorem is also known as Stigler’s law of eponymy even though it was originally formulated by Robert Merton.

Alan Turing – whose huge strides in the conception of the first generation of computers (his work for the Colossus computer, the world’s first programmable digital electronic computer) were destined to never to be fully attributed to him, due to his untimely death.

Nikola Tesla – who died almost totally penniless, while the ideas he had put forward for radio (he demonstrated a wireless communication – radio – in 1894) made Guglielmo Marconi (who received Nobel Prize in Physics for radio in 1909) a fortune.

Geoffrey Dummer – whose musings on the development of the integrated circuit preceded those of Bob Noyce and Jack Kilby by almost a decade, but due to lack of vision by the British Government his plans were never to make it off the drawing board.

Johann Loschmidt – an Austrian scientist who calculated in 1865 the number of molecules in a mole but it was Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro, whose name became associated with the number.

Albert Neisser – who discovered leprosy (officially known as Hansen’s disease, in honour of the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen, who discovered the bacterium responsible but did not manage to cultivate it, or show that it was truly linked to leprosy), and who obtained from Hansen a large set of samples from people with leprosy. Neisser succeeded in staining the bacterium and, in 1880, announced that he had discovered the cause of leprosy. Hansen wrote a lengthy article about his own research for a conference on leprosy, which credited him, not Niesser, for the discovery.

Robert Hooke – Who postulated, amongst other things, the true nature of planetary motion, only to witness his rival Isaac Newton take all the praise for it.

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This blog aims to document failures in an objective manner by exposing, reflecting upon and considering each failure case, but leaving "lessons learnt" and conclusions to the experience and know-how of a reader. Documented failures draw on a wide range of topics. Historic, economic, strategic, entrepreneurial, technological and personal failures find their way here. Me? My name is Hayk and I run this blog. Contact me via email on hayk [dot] hakobyan [at] gmail or via Twitter on @2mavin.